If you are looking for something to watch (or listen to), we have been having a blast in Sunday School.
We are going through the book “The Church of Us vs Them” and it has been really challenging.
The Church of Us vs Them week 5 recap
Enjoy the video below or listen to the audio podcast here https://vermonthillsumc.org/podcast/us-vs-them-week-5-recap/
I posted this 2 years ago and thought it might be fun to revisit.
As Christians we confess that Jesus was born to a virgin. Some people doubt the accuracy of that – but they may not realize that it was not that uncommon back then.
Here are just 10 people born of a virgin in the ancient world:
One theory is that when somebody who led a deeply impactful life died, those who wrote about them later would attempt to say something special about them. One of the ways that they could do that was to say something extraordinary about their birth. It was a way of that there was something significant, even about they way that they were conceived.
Sometimes it was that they were born to people that were really old (past the age of child-bearing age).
Think of Issac born to Abraham and Sarah in the Old Testament or John the Baptist born to Zechariah and Elizabeth in the New (Advent).
Now, If somebody wanted to take the origin of their hero up a notch, they could say that there was no human dad … it was a god! (like Zeus)
This is why some think that Jesus’ autobiographers took it up even one more notch! Not only did a God not have sex with women … there was NO sex at all!
Now some say “yeah, lots of people were said to be born of a virgin … but Jesus actually was.”
This is where the problem starts. As best as I can discern, there basically three ways to approach the problem: physics, meta-physics or linguistics.
Physics:
Some people take an approach that is so certain that even science itself would be proved wrong. This usually comes up around issue like the Shroud of Turin (the cloth Jesus was buried in). I once heard a very confident person say that if we did DNA test on the blood on the shroud it would show that Jesus was fully human with 46 pairs of chromosomes – only instead of 23 from the female mother and 23 from the male father – Jesus would have 46 human ones from Mary.
I find this problematic for the same reason that I do not believe in the super-natural. It concedes the rules of the games to science (reductive naturalism) then tries to fill in the gaps with God. That is a losing game-plan if ever I heard one.
Meta-Physics:
Other people try to get around the whole reductive scientific debate by saying “Look, if God could make the world in 6 days out of nothing, then what is to make a virgin pregnant? God does whatever God wants to do and who are we to question that?”
I am not a big fan of this approach either. It seems to say that revelation doesn’t have to report to reason and that God can not be evaluated on any reasonable standard conceived of by humans.
It seems just a short leap to say that God can elect who God wants for salvation God can pick favorites if that is what ‘He‘ wants to do.
It seems to retreat into the silo of ecclesiastic isolation and unaccountability. I think we have to look a little deeper ask some bigger questions.
Linguistics:
This is an interesting approach that some in the post-liberal camp or comparable schools of thoughts might take.
The basic line is that it’s not the physics or meta-physics of the virgin birth that matters, its the way that it impacts us as people and forms us as a community. The importance of the language found in the gospels has to do with how it functions for us as a community and tradition.
Some folks don’t like this linguistic approach because it seems like theologically ‘thin soup’ to them. They look at the formulations that are quantified in the early creeds and they make definite and literal assumptions about what is behind them.
I am however nervous that all of this controversy is simply because we don’t know how to read a gospel. It’s like when we get sucked into debates about talking snakes in the garden of Eden or trying to prove scientifically how a man like Jonah could stay alive in the belly of a whale for 3 days and not be eaten by the stomach acid (or something).
It would be the equivalent of people 1,000 years from now arguing that we actually thought there was a place called Mudville and that a man named Casey was literally up to to bat. It is because we don’t know how to read the genre of literature.
Jesus was born of a virgin – we confess that by faith, it is affirmed in our ancient creeds and it functions in our community to form us as people.
* I even found one internet source that claims Dionysus was born of a virgin on December 25 and, as the Holy Child, was placed in a manger. He was a traveling teacher who performed miracles. He “rode in a triumphal procession on an ass.” He was a sacred king killed and eaten in an eucharistic ritual for fecundity and purification. Dionysus rose from the dead on March 25. He was the God of the Vine, and turned water into wine. He was called “King of Kings” and “God of Gods.” He was considered the “Only Begotten Son,” Savior,” “Redeemer,” “Sin Bearer,” Anointed One,” and the “Alpha and Omega.” He was identified with the Ram or Lamb. His sacrificial title of “Dendrites” or “Young Man of the Tree” intimates he was hung on a tree or crucified.
We are trying something new for Advent this year at Homebrewed Christianity. Each week we are looking at the 4 suggested texts from the lectionary and talking about how we would approach them.
In week one there were 3 texts that we resonated with and a fourth that we struggled with. That fourth text was Mark chapter 13 where Jesus talks about signs of the end, fig trees and catastrophe.
The one thing that I do like about the fourth text is the exhortation to ‘stay alert’. There are many passages in the Bible that call us to wake up or stay alert. It is a theme that always gets my attention.
What are we in danger of falling asleep to?
What is causing that slumber?
Some would want to answer with a classic concepts like human nature, the effects of sin, or some other predictable formulation. While those may all be true, the danger has never been greater nor the effects as pervasive as they are in 21st century.
We live in an odd time of global markets, multi-national corporations and rampant consumerism. Ours is an age of media saturation, electronic daze and commercial overload.
I have found the tool of Critical Theory helpful in analyzing our age of what Cornell West calls ‘weapons of mass distraction’. High modernity has brought us both amazing goods and services (think cell phones and the internet) as well as unprecedented capacity for destruction and devastation.
The formative thinkers in the field of Critical Theory were responding to the massive shifts of the 20th century and the realities of two World Wars that exposed human suffering and the capacity of evil in new ways. Not only did we have Hiroshima and Auschwitz but we had them on film. Some talk about this being the end of ideology (utopia) and the resulting loss of hope.
I have adapted and modified some relevant concepts from my reading and will be using them this weekend for Advent week 1. The questions this week are:
What have we fallen asleep to?
What is causing the slumber?
To what do we need to be awakened?
Black Friday is the high holy day of capitalism. Consumerism is a seductive and intoxicating atmosphere – it is the air that we all breathe in late modernity.
Consumerism, however, has a numbing effect that dulls our senses and saps our energy. This happens in 3 predictable phases.
Alienation is the result of humans being commodified and thus separated from that which they produce. It also isolates us from one another as we are simultaneously objectified as consumers and subjected to an onslaught of ads that inform us we are not good enough, we don’t have enough and that the thing we don’t have would make us happy-attractive-successful.
This leads to disillusionment because we buy stuff, we pay for services, we upgrade, we super-size … and yet it does not satisfy. We are dis-couraged. Aren’t we supposed to live in a post-racial America? What is one supposed to do in the fallout from the recent economic collapse and ongoing environmental devastation?
The final stage is resignation. The machine is too big. It feels like we are just cogs in a giant mechanism of consumption, corruption and growing disparity. The game is rigged and we know it. But we need stuff so we work more than we ever have and are less satisfied. We watch the news and see how bad is out there and we want to retreat into our screens and games. From Candy Crush to Fantasy Football we are active participants relegated to passive spectators.
We are slowly lulled to sleep in the system and numbed to the needs of our neighbors.
What can one person do in the face of this overwhelming and all-encompassing structure of society?
Wake Up! Stay Alert! Don’t be dis-couraged.
That is the call of the texts this week. Don’t get distracted by falling stars and light-less moons. Listen to what Jesus is saying. He is telling you that it is going to get bad. Yes there will be progress in certain ways … but don’t be deceived: evil just morphs and takes on other forms.
We can celebrate that slavery ended for one part of the population… but realize that there are more humans in slavery right now than at the height of the slave trade.
Racism is not as overt as it once was … but now it morphed into a New Jim Crow and Dog Whistle Politics.
Wake Up! Stay Alert!
If the slumber results from alienation, disillusionment and resignation then the beginning of waking up is three-fold as well.
Do these three things and you will be amazed at what you are awakened to.
If you are interested you can listen to the episode – Mark 13 starts around the 1 hour mark.
You can also sign up for the class for December.
Preparing for qualifying exams is intense. Going back over every book and paper that might be relevent to your five topics is helpful for compiling the work you have done over the last four years.
I am constantly thinking and reading about theology. One of my fascinations is the various models or frameworks that others employ to outline the theological endeavor. Some use a ‘landscape’ motif, with this group over here and that group over there, while others utilize a ‘spectrum’ analogy often moving from one ‘direction’ to the other.
One can do this in a historic sense, from classic on the left to contemporary on the right, or more of a conviction/conclusion breakdown with conservative at one end and liberal at the other.*
The first list I encountered was in my pre-doctoral prep when researching the discipline of Practical Theology I would often see the field contrasted with the ‘Big 4’ schools of theology:
Practical Theology is different in that, like Sociology, it utilizes qualitative methods like interviews, case studies and ethnography.
I also like Grenz and Olson’s approach in “Who Needs Theology: an invitation to the study of God“, where they move from:
They don’t seem to find much value in either the Folk or the Academic (who only write for or can be understood by other academics) but they make a good case for the middle 3 approaches.
Recently I have come up with a different spectrum:
Creedal asks “What has the church historically believed about this?”
Confessional asks “What do we as Christian say about this?”
Constructive asks “What can we as Christian say about this?” or “What do we want to say about this?”
Radical asks “If we weren’t bound by institutional constraints, what would we say about this?”
It wasn’t until I was updating this blog’s ‘Big Ideas’ page that I realized that my real passion is not a ‘constructive’ but a ‘comparative’ approach. I am fascinated by the diversity and complexity of faith communities and historically situated or contextual approaches. I love to survey the landscape first (comparative) and then figure out where I want to travel to or settle down (constructive).
This approach has been very helpful to me so I wanted to pass it along.
What about you? What spectrum or framework have you found helpful?
* Those who have read me before will know that I contest this second spectrum because there are schools outside or past liberal schools of thought and they are not accounted for but simply lumped into the liberal camp for lack of nuance and specificity.
An interesting way to expose the difference between two things is to take out the subject of great quote and replace it with something else to see if it still works.
If your replacement X cannot work in place of the initial Y then you are forced to ask ‘why is this the case?’
Let me give you an example:
(The Church) was there to remind the (society) of what it had flouted: art, pleasure, gender, power, sexuality, language, madness, desire, spirituality, the family, the body, the ecosystem, the unconscious, ethnicity, life-style, hegemony. This, on any estimate, was a sizable slice of human existence.
When I find a great quote or list, I try to plug-in ‘the church’ and see if could be true historically.
I would love to be able to say that the church has been about these things:
If that has not been the case, then, I have to ask “why not?” and it is often that search which is telling.
If the church has not, or is not, about promoting those things then what has it represented? It is that search which is illuminating.
What is keeping that sentence from being true of the church?
Here is a second set of examples. All of these quotes are from the same chapter:
(The Church) refuses to identify freedom with any institutional arrangement or fixed system of thought. It questions the hidden assumptions and purposes of competing theories and existing forms of practice. It has little use for what is known as ‘perennial philosophy’. (The Church) insists that thought must respond to new problems and the new possibilities for liberation that arise from changing historical circumstances.
I want the above quote to be true! If it is not, then what is keeping it from being so?
They investigated the ways in which thinking was being reduced to mechanical notions of what is operative and profitable, ethical reflection was tending to vanish and aesthetic enjoyment was becoming more standardized. (The Church) noted with alarm how interpreting modern society was becoming even more difficult. Alienation and reification [turning people into things] were thus analyzed in terms of how they … robbed the world of meaning and purpose, and turned the individual into a cog in the machine.
The above quote is challenging because it is almost possible.
The next one is just for fun.
(The Church) lost its ability to offer an integrated critique of society, conceptualize a meaningful politics, and project new ideas of liberation. Textual exegesis, cultural preoccupations, and metaphysical disputations increasingly turned (the church) into a victim of its own success. The result has been an enduring identity crisis.
Any guesses as to who this was actually referring ?
These 3 quotes are from chapter 1 in Critical Theory a very short introduction. The first quote was from Terry Eagleton. After Theory (Kindle Locations 325-327) in reference to Cultural Theory and the traditional Left.
Why am I attracted to both Cultural and Critical Theory? Maybe it is because they are often about the things I desperately wish being a pastor was about …
I find this experiment helpful in attempting to crack assumptions about what the church is and has been.
I will never tire of reminding people that there is a gap between what many think the church is and what the church can be.
What do you think? Does the experiment work? Is it helpful?
Any quotes that you love we could try it with?
I was taught to refute evolution. It was a cornerstone to apologetics.
Zebras and their stripes were a primary example used to refute evolution. If the stripes are for camouflaging a herd of zebras from predators … the first striped offspring would have actually stood out from the heard and thus been an easy target.
This is an example of getting ahead of oneself without fully entering into the school of thought one is trying to combat.
We saw this same problem with Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron’s banana conversation. You can’t simply start with where we are and extrapolate backwards from there.
We can’t pretend to honestly engage in asking questions if we begin with the assumption of the answers. That will always result in coming out with twisted conclusions.
Admittedly, scientists have been baffled over the zebra’s stripes for a long time. Recently some strong studies has have shown that the stripes are not about camouflaging herds from large predators but about flies. The region where zebras dwell has a breed of flies called tsetse that are legendary in their viciousness. Scientists have historically known that flies have an aversion to landing on striped surfaces. The zebra’s striped pattern acts then as a natural deterrent. This leads to greater health with less blood loss and therefore greater vitality which benefits reproduction – passing on those key genetics to offspring.
It turns out that zebras stripes are not about herds camouflaging from large predators but about individuals deterring small pests. This means that the initial zebra ancestor to have that genetic variation would have benefited and thus that attribute would be more likely to be passed on to the next generation.
So the apologetics argument I learned is flawed and would not refute the point it is intended to.
That is problem #1 with not fully entering into an idea well enough to understand it – there has to be a commitment to the question not just a conviction about the conclusion.
Problem #2 is that much of the suspicion from creationists about evolutionary thought is based on the hard and cold version of survival of the fittest from a century ago. Many don’t know of newer strains of evolutionary thought that incorporate cooperation, mutuality and emergence thought.
Evolution has evolved in the past 30 years but many creation apologists prefer to takes pot-shots at the straw man caricature of darwinian schools of the past.
As we wrap up the ABC’s of Theology series, I wanted to acknowledge that not only has christian belief evolved and adapted over the centuries and encourage you to embrace these historic adjustments. The gospel is itself incarnational and the universe is evolutionary. Those two things go together beautifully. The gospel is good news and is constantly in need to be contextualized to new times and new places. The scriptures are inherently translatable and come into every language and culture. This is one of the unique aspects of the christian religion.
If evolution is true of the universe, christians should have no need to avoid or refute it. We can embrace evolutionary thought wholeheartedly.
Christians should, after all, be people who love truth.
Artwork for the series by Jesse Turri
You may also want to check out earlier posts about technology, the Bible and specifically genres within the Bible.
There is no phrase that is more misused, or more contentious, than The Word of God. We might need to take a vacation from throwing the phrase around as a tight summary until we pull it apart and clarify its multiple uses. 
The Word of God, when used properly, carries three layers of meaning:
For clarity I will now refer to the first and third meanings as ‘the word of the Lord’ and the second as the ‘Logos made flesh’.
The pitfall that some fall into is that they take this last sense (revelatory elements within scripture) and attempt to make it concrete (or foundational). Doing so is to erroneously confuse the messenger and message, the vessel with the element, the sign for the object.
Calling the Bible the Word of God is as inaccurate as it is accurate. It is not exactly true … but it is true enough that it is tempting. The problem is that it confused the ‘curves ahead’ road sign on the mountain road for the road up the mountain. It is not that they are unrelated – it is that they are not equivalent. The map may be accurate, and trustworthy for the journey, but it is not the landscape itself.
Knowing the map well is not the same as going on the journey.
This is the important difference between a sign and symbol.
One can see the problem in legal court and in Sunday school. It is ironic to place one’s hand on a Bible and swear ‘to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help you God’. The irony, for those who have actually read the Bible, is that it says in two New Testament passages not to do such things. We are not to swear by things but to simply let our yes be ‘yes’ and our no, ‘no’. That should be enough. We don’t need to swear by heaven or earth or anything like God. It is an odd practice.
Similarly we see things like this in the songs we learn as children:
The B-I-B-L-E,
that’s the books for me,
I stand alone on the Word of God
The Bible is not a book. It is a collection of 66 books by different authors in different centuries representing different histories, perspectives and opinions utilizing diverse genres of writing. This is part of why you can not say ‘the Bible says’.
When we say that ‘the word of God is living and active’ or that ‘all scripture is God breathed and useful’ we are right … but we must avoid the temptation of too quickly boiling those three into down into one interchangeable phrase lest we miss the awesome power and invitation provided by the interplay between them.
Now, if we mean that because of what we learn in the Bible, we hear the word of the Lord and believe in the Logos made flesh … that would be fantastic. ?If, however, we mean that the Bible is equivalent to the Word of God, then we have set our children up to be confounded, frustrated and spiritually impotent.
We have given them a road sign and told them it was the adventure. ?The word of the Lord propels us on a journey! To walk the way of the Logos made flesh, to know the truth of that which was in the beginning – with God and was God – and to live the life of the ages (eternal life).
To paraphrase a famous line – we are like children making mud-pies out of dirt in the back alley while there are real pies waiting in the kitchen.
Part of the problem is that we have try to cram too much into the phrase ‘the word of God’ and asked more from it than can be expected from any sign or symbol.
The most helpful thing I have found to address this problem is called the Wesleyan Quad. The quadrilateral is composed of 4 elements:
Those 4 elements also work best in that sequence.
– We go to scripture first for it records examples of the word of the Lord and points us to the Logos made flesh.
-We next consult the tradition, for religion has a given-ness to it. We inherent a living tradition and participate in its practices, rituals, ceremonies, train of the thought and teaching.
– We also recognize that importance of our community-experiences. No one is spiritual or religious on their own like no one uses language alone. We learn a language from others and use a language to communicate with others. It is not enough to know of a religion – one participates and thus experiences. We learn from and incorporate our community-experiences.
– Finally comes reason. We are made in the image of God and that divine Logos (reason) was given to us to exercise responsibly. We are not called to be robots who mechanically parrot the inherited sentences in rote repetition. There is a deep need to think about things so that our tradition does not become a dead artifact, or worse, a false idol.
The danger of what has been called ‘Bibliolotry’ is not simply that it makes the Bible ‘a paper pope’ or ‘the 4th member of the trinity’ (as bad as those seem). The danger is in missing the way, the truth, and the life that is available to us by instead settling for a road-sign instead of an adventure.
I would love to hear your thoughts about my distinction between the Word of God as the word of the Lord, the Logos made flesh and the Bible.
Artwork for the series by Jesse Turri
For more read my earlier posts about Inspiration and about Revelation.
I used to joke with people that you had to be careful attending churches that had a ‘U’ in them. United, Universal, Unitarian, Unity, etc. They seemed either to believe in almost everything or in not much of anything. 
It was much funnier back then… but there is something to it.
Theological words are much the same. ‘U’ words tend to be big and sweeping in their scope. Much like the ‘I’ words seem to embody a certain period and concern, the ‘U’ words are large and consequential.
We will tackle Universalism first and then look at Ultimate Concern.
Grenz defines it this way – but pay attention to how he does so:
Universalism. Known historically as apokatastasis, the belief that all persons will be saved. Hence universalism involves the affirmation of universal *salvation and the denial of eternal punishment. Universalists believe that ultimately all humans are somehow in union with Christ and that in the fullness of time they will gain release from the penalty of sin and be restored to God. Twentieth-century universalism often rejects the deity of Jesus and explores the “universal” bases of all religions.
Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms (Kindle Locations 1325-1327). Kindle Edition.
Did you see it? By presenting the concept as a historical concept with some biblical precedent, there is put forward some credibility. Then modern versions are handled in one sentence and in a way that rejects the deity of Jesus.
This is not a mistake, nor is it an accident.
Universalism is an old idea. The version that emerged in the 20th century is a different animal. In a globalized context where religions, traditions and world-views bump up against each other everyday, the conversation changes immensely.
There are really 2 distinct universalisms:
If you think that the christian God loves everyone and that ultimately (another U word) God’s work is for everyone and that basically everyone will end up with God, that would be a type of universalism.
Contemporary universalism is as different from classic universalism as lighting is from a lighting bug.
Classic universalism is concerned with with work of Christ for every-one [thus Grenz’s concern for Jesus’ divinity]. Contemporary universalism is not about Christ’s effectiveness so much as the inherent validity of traditions and religions.
Both of these notions are beautiful attempts at something grand but are warped deeply by the legacy of colonialism.
I could write (and have written) massive papers on contemporary approaches to universalism – specifically within the context of inter-religious dialogue and postmodern approaches to pluralism.
The globalized world of the 21st century means that religious conversations and convictions are perhaps the most important conversation happening in our lifetime. Unless Jesus’ return is soon, we are going to have to learn to live on this planet together.
Which leads us to another important U word.
Ultimate Concern: The idea arising from Paul Tillich that everyone has something that is of highest importance to him or her. Tillich suggested that persons’ ultimate concern, or “what concerns ultimately,” is their God. In this sense, everyone is inherently religious.
Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms (Kindle Locations 1318-1320). Kindle Edition.
Tillich presented several innovative concepts* that reframe the whole theological enterprise. This notion of Ultimate Concern is the perfect addition to the Classic/Contemporary address of Universalism and Pluralism.
Thoughts? Concerns? Questions?
Below is a short bibliography of resources I find helpful.
*If I were not in the field of Practical Theology, I would write on Tillich. His notion of correlation and his approach to ‘the ground of being’ fascinate me. If it were not for the linguist turn that happened in continental philosophy after his time, I think that he would have been the most significant theologian of the 20th century. Alas, the world changed.
Prothero’s innovative non-academic take
Knitter’s Theologies of Religion
a christian take on multiple versions of ‘salvations’
Catherine Cornille on the impossibility of this whole thing
Revelation is a topic sure to bring raised blood-pressure and raised voices! This is true no matter which ‘revelation’ you mean.
Both are deadly serious in their respective arenas.
Let’s deal with the concept first and then with the Biblical book.
Revelation: Refers both to the process by which God discloses the divine nature and the mystery of the divine will and purpose to human beings, and to the corpus of truth disclosed. Some theologians maintain that revelation consists of both God’s activity in *salvation history through word and deed, culminating in Jesus (who mediates and fulfills God’s self-revelation) and the ongoing activity of God to move people to yield to, accept and personally appropriate that reality.
Pocket Dictionary of Theological Terms (Kindle Locations 1139-1143). Kindle Edition.
Revelation is often further parsed out into two categories:
Those who are suspicious of General revelation say that it can misleading to try to decipher things about a perfect God from a fallen world.
Those who are suspicious of Special revelation say that it wreaks of fideism – only those who already believe, have read the Bible and been empowered by Holy Spirit can truly understand.
There are many insightful schools of thought that address the concept of ‘revelation’. For many in the evangelical camp, they look to the thought of Karl Barth as the final word on the subject. [If you are interested in such things, please consider signing up for the upcoming 6-week online intensive with Tripp Fuller. Barth is week one.]
_________
Growing up, when someone said ‘revelation’ they meant the Book of Revelation – as in the apocalyptic letter that closes out the New Testament.
I love the book of Revelation. I study it all the time. I am inspired by it and challenged by it and am constantly referring to imagery within it.
The only thing I dislike is what most people do with the book of Revelation.
The early audience for that book would have taken great consolation and comfort from it. The sad thing is that we should be writing things like the book Revelation for our time – but don’t because we think that John’s letter is about our time!
The book of Revelation is written in a literary form called apocalyptic. It is part of a genre called literature of the oppressed. When you lived in an occupied territory under an oppressive regime, you write in code. You use imagery. You use allegory and analogy.
The book of Revelation is political critique and prophetic hope about those first couple of centuries of the church! It was meant to give hope and raise expectation for those early believers.
We should study the forms and harness the same prophetic imagination that the author of Revelation had and use it for our time. Unfortunately, we have had a failure of imagination because we have been taught to think that Revelation is about our time …
I could literally give you 1,000 examples of how the imagery in the book of Revelation is genius and time appropriate to the first two centuries. I have spent countless hours studying the subject.
My one prayer is that God reveals to those who are most sincere that the inspiration and imagery that we see in the book of Revelation would be replicated (and surpassed) in our generation for our generation.
God knows we need it.
Artwork for the series by Jesse Turri
If you want to dig deeper I suggest commentary on Revelation by Ronald Farmer in the Chalice series
Bo Sanders: Public Theology 